If the tools are bad, nature's voice is muffled. If the tools are good, nature will give us a clear answer to a clear question.

We simply don't know yet what's going to happen to the carbon in the atmosphere.

If you're in the business world, that's what's expected: You should go bust and then start again on something else. So it's a much more relaxed kind of a culture. It's also competitive, but not in such a vicious way. I think the academic world is actually much more destructive of young people.

The only way to improve the chances for finding winners is to keep all the choices open and try them all.

You have this world of mathematics, which is very real and which contains all kinds of wonderful stuff. And then we also have the world of nature, which is real, too. And that, by some miracle, the language that nature speaks is the same language that we invented for mathematics. That's just an amazing piece of luck, which we don't understand.

The laws of nature are constructed in such a way as to make the universe as interesting as possible.

It is our task, both in science and in society at large, to prove the conventional wisdom wrong and to make our unpredictable dreams come true